#B'Elanna!!! Femme B'Elanna!!! Guys please <- stumbling out of the house still. falling down and crawling. Guys.

[bumblingbabooshka]

-crawling out from under an abandoned house- B'Elanna Torres who has been denied the chance to feel feminine and small and protected and cherished (as everyone around her constantly portrays her as 'strong, angry, loner, explosive, mean, bitch, standoffish' which obviously heavily colors her perception of herself and makes her less likely to feel she can be vulnerable or she literally just can't be because she has to do her vitally important job and survive and help everyone else survive) to the point that even though she desires it she feels it's silly to even want let alone pursue or expect X Seven of Nine who has been denied the chance to explore her own relationship to gender because ever since she became aware of the concept it has been her tied (and monitored, chastised when deviating) strictly to the most traditional and sexualized definition of femininity imaginable - discovering that she's butch. Are you hearing me? B'Elanna Torres who fantasizes about being wanted gently by men, loved and yearned for by them [looking at her daydream of Chakotay, her classically romantic novels] and Seven of Nine who is not a man but is not a woman - who loves and yearns for her in a way she can't quite express through the narrow lense of heteronormative womanhood that she's been given. Seven of Nine who wants to kiss B'Elanna's hand and protect her and B'Elanna who's never once been protected by anyone, not even her parents. Her own father wouldn't protect her from bullying, saying she was too sensitive. That she should have been stronger. Tom saying he 'didn't think' she cared about romantic gestures because she's so strong and independent. [In this way she is expected, even as a child or in an intimate partnership, to take on everything stoically and to react to anything at all is an 'outsized reaction', out of character, shocking and dangerous - there is no time and no relationship no matter how intimate where she can be vulnerable and soft and wanting without it being 'too much'] Is this thing on???? Can you imagine Seven telling B'Elanna that she sees how scared she is, how fragile she is, and that she'll protect her with her life if necessary??? Can you imagine Seven, injured in some way [calculated yet foolhardy on her part], being tended to frantically but skillfully by B'Elanna who's scolding her with a furrowed brow and a voice so drenched with worry it dulls any harshness in her words which Seven isn't listening to anyway because she's too busy looking at her face and hearing the sound and cataloging how fast her heart is beating and thinking back to all those old movies Tom showed them all with scenes of women tending to their men and being rewarded for it with a kiss and an 'I'm sorry darling' and those holonovels Janeway goes through where a woman in a silk nightgown meets her monstrous lover in the rain or a darkened hall after finding out some terrible secret and nearly drops her candle upon seeing him but remains brave, holding onto her love. Everyone else might be afraid, but not her, she understands him ['we difficult patients have to stick together'] and Seven never saw herself as the tending type or the bleeding heart but B'Elanna is. B'Elanna loves machines, loves people so desperately it makes her miserable, and she never drops her candle. B'Elanna's beating, bleeding heart is pouring over her and Seven realizes she wants it for her own. She wants her for her own. Her love. Her woman. Seven - She's a scoundrel, a stately figure with a terrible secret written all over her face, a brute who doesn't deserve the tender touch he's being gifted and she raises her hands to cup B'Elanna's face and kisses her. And it's the only experience she would privately characterize as perfect. And something clicks very neatly into place.